Graduate Student Immersion

Real-World Care

International service learning trips teach more than just clinical care. This immersion program offered to our graduate program students focuses on quality improvement and provides the opportunity for students to work in unfamiliar cultures while facing real-world health care challenges such as working with interpreters and facing medical supply shortages.

Graduate students in the School of Nursing’s Nurse Practitioner program Phil Dillard (Emergency) and Abby Wetzel (Nurse-Midwifery) discuss their immersion program experience with Cabin Creek Health Systems and working alongside clinic staff at the Clendenin Clinic to evacuate medically-fragile residents during the region’s recent storms and devastating flooding. Cabin Creek is a federally-qualified health center that provides essential health services to vulnerable populations in rural West Virginia through several community-based clinics.

Santo, Haiti Summer

The group will travel directly to Santo, Haiti where students will work directly under the supervision of the faculty and on site physicians in the community on various health projects. This experience is fostered through a partnership with Foundation for Peace. Foundation for Peace is a well-established organization that supports schools, water purification facilities, churches and medical clinics within the Haitian rural communities.

A typical mission day includes community outreach, relationship-building, and 600 to 1,000 patients a day, usually in rural communities.

Moultrie Summer

Partnering with The Ellenton Farmworker Clinic, the program is centered in agriculturally rich southwest Georgia. Students are housed in the Hampton Inn in Moultrie, Georgia in Colquitt County. Counties served by the Ellenton Clinic are Colquitt, Cook, Brooks and Tift. Each day students deliver preventive care (screenings and well child physicals) to children of migrant workers attending a county sponsored summer school. Evenings are spent delivering episodic care to farmworkers at farms or housing areas.

West Virginia

Students will stay together in a large rental house near Charleston, West Virginia. This group is hosted by the Cabin Creek and New River Health Systems, two Federally-Qualified Health Centers each consisting of 5-6 clinics. Between the various clinics, opportunities exist for health promotion, chronic disease management and acute illness care across the entire spectrum from pediatric to geriatric patients. Both FQHC's excel in the integration of behavioral health in primary care. For more information on these clinics, please see www.cabincreekhealth.com andhttp://www.nrhawv.org. Expect to share close quarters and long days; but also beautiful views and a unique hill-folks culture of hospitality.

Guatemala

In fall of 2015, the Ministry of Health in the Department of Alta Verapaz (a mountainous state in central Guatemala) requested the assistance of the Emory Midwifery Program to assist with continuing education for indigenous comadronas (traditional midwives) who attend births at home for approximately 40% of pregnant women in the Department. We've now conducted 3 trips and trained 4 groups of about 25 comadronas; specifically, students have designed and implemented training sessions on hypertension, hemorrhage, sepsis, and prolonged labor. In June of 2018, the group conducted one training in a village outside of Cobán during the first week; for the second week, the group delivered clinical care (e.g., family planning, GYN screenings, possibly prenatal care) in Solola.

Grady Hospital

This Atlanta Immersion will strengthen students’ clinical skills while also developing an understanding of healthcare disparities, even within large metropolitan areas. The students will work primarily with undocumented and/or uninsured ESRD patients receiving dialysis treatments through the Grady emergency department. Additionally, thye will have the opportunity to volunteer with other Atlanta non-profit organizations serving low-resource patients. The experience will culminate in presentations for patients on various health topics as well as a service, systems, or research deliverable to be presented to faculty at the end of the experience.